DFL stories for Weirdmonger Wheel links followed by NEMONYMOUS TWO reviews etc. at the foot of this page.
DEAR MR. WHIZZO
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
I saw your advert in the Chronicle and I was wondering whether you can bring your show to my son’s birthday party on 24 July. You will be required at 3 p.m. at the above address. Please let me know if you require any additional equipment. When confirming your availability for the date, please quote your fee and I will, by return, finalise the arrangement.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy
P.S. It is a young teenage party, so any dubious props will not be required. Conjuring, balloon-bending and juggling all would be fine. I don’t suppose you’re into jiggery-pokery, anyway.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am grateful for your letter which I only received today. The postman is not so lightning quick with his prestidigitation as I! Anyway, I shall be delighted to attend your son’s party at the appointed time. The fee will be at your discretion according to satisfaction.
Yours dutifully “Whizzo”.
P.S. My speciality is sawing a lady in half. I hope you do not consider THIS trick to be dubious.
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
With reference to your letter of 21 July, I am pleased to confirm the arrangement. Do you know this part of the town? Our address is not in some of the street maps, believe it or not. To assist you, I attach a little hand-written sketch that takes you from the Broadway. We are at the end of the cul-de-sac that you can see I have called Brown Street because that is on the nameplate up on the end terrace, but the correct postal address is as you see it at the head of my letter. Any problems, please ring the telephone number shown which is my neighbour’s (we don’t have one ourselves). With regard to your P.S. I have only just had the carpet cleaned, so I would prefer you to give that particular trick a miss. I look forward to meeting you on the day. My son is over the moon.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am sorry I did not attend the party. It was not for the want of trying. But my sense of direction is as bad as my rabbit-pulling is good, no doubt. Brown Street turned out to be a long, endless road of semis where some of the houses were unnumbered and others randomly so it seemed. As for the telephone number you gave me, it got hold of someone who said they couldn’t hear me because of a lot of noise from their neighbours. I hope your son was not too disappointed by my non-appearance. I expect he has grown out of my old tricks, anyway.
Regards, “Whizzo”.
P.S. Call me again when your grandchildren arrive!
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
Thank you for your letter. I am extremely mystified by what you write. If it was not you who gave such a splendid performance at my son’s party, who was it? When you stepped into our broom cupboard under the stairs saying that when we opened it again you would be gone - and you were right, nothing but the gas meter chatting numbers through. And not one false bottom to be seen, of course, as lesser magicians so often use at the Variety House. I think it’s marvellous indeed you using my house as a prop. You ought to go on the stage! We did get a lot of complaints, however, from parents whose kids never came back from that game of Hide and Seek you organised. No complaints from me, though! I hope that small token of my appreciation I gave you was sufficient recompense. I was so head over heels with excitement, I didn’t know my fingers from my thumbs. Anyway, I assure you that I shall recommend you highly to my friends at the Ladies Group. By the way, your trick of making the house next door completely disappear along with everybody in it was really a coup-de-theatre.
Yours, Agnes Tidy.
P.S. I liked your cheeky costume. Very snazzy! Who sewed on all the sequins?
(published ‘Krax’ 1992)
HARD-ONS
Dear Agnes, I am writing to thank you for a wonderful weekend. Even when we broke down, we had such a good laugh, didn't we, finding out that it was because we'd run out of petrol. But the torrential rain was the icing on the cake! Not that it was particularly cold, but we could have done with some tucker to stoke us up.
The AA was so understanding. What a nice man! It's not often one ends up calling such people by their first names, is it?
Anyway, the hotel was a real hoot, too, wasn't it? Fawlty Towers wasn't in it! Wouldn't have been so bad if the manager had been as funny as John Cleese. What a creepy fellah! He liked us even less than we liked him, didn't he? Said there weren't any reservations in our names. Until we tried to tell him that names didn't matter, only bodies. There was almost a ghost of a smile on his face. In any event how could we have made any reservations, this being an emergency stop-over? He had no answer to that, did he?
The box room at the top of the hotel wasn't too bad, was it? Not exactly the Royal Suite, but serviceable enough. Good job we still had the AA man to lug the bags up there for us - what with the surly bellboy trying to avoid us at all costs and his bosom pal the manager trying to make us feel as if we were in a foreign country.
Anyway, Agnes, if it weren't for you, I'd've'd a lousy weekend, listening to the relentless drumming on the roof. Pity the AA man couldn't have stayed. But his bleeper did keep going off, didn't it, and they do say three's a crowd, don't they?
Here's to the next time, Affectionately, Ample.
P.S. That midget manager looked disappointed when we didn't complain at the end of our stay, didn't he? Good job we didn't give him that pleasure. I very nearly made a scarcastic comment about his bellboy, but think I got away with it. They all spoke another language, anyway. Didn't sound like Welsh, though, did it?
#
Dear Ample,
Thanks for your letter which I received recently.
I'll come clean right at the start - I've unfortunately misplaced your letter, and answering it by means of memory is not exactly the most ideal situation for a conscientious correspondent like me. Anyway, discretion to the wind, here goes.
I was sorry to hear that your trouble flared up again. You shouldn't really keep doing it, if the pain's so bad. If I were you, I'd insist on it. It'd be worse on the inside than on the out, I'll be bound. Still, I wouldn't know, would I? Life has not been much of an experience for me like it has been for you, Ample, has it? - by a long chalk! Be sure to give your latest my love, won't you?
Glad to learn that the twins have settled their differences.
Oh, yes, before I forget, Ample, do not take any cheek from that landlord of yours. All the rights are with tenants these days. And if his harrassment persists, just stick to your guns - he'll soon get the message. By the way, is he the chap I once met? You introduced him as your own personal Rackman - so I assume it was your landlord. A man with the narrowest gap between the eyes I've ever seen in my life. No wonder he looks so shifty.
I've very little news of my own or, rather, if I have, it's so insignificant, it's gone clean out of my mind. (Leaving only dirty thoughts!? Whoops! Godd job you know me.) We'll have to go on holiday together one day. Just the two of us. Then you can teach me a thing or three about life, eh?
Much love, Agnes.
#
Dear Agnes,
What no P.S.? That's the first time you've written to me without a P.S. Did you forget?
Let me say straightaway that I was somewhat nonplussed by your letter. Sometimes I think you must be going doo-lally. I know you had misplaced my letter but... What twins? Which trouble that has flared up again? Indeed, I should ask who the devil is my "latest" but I won't! What's more, I am an owner-occupier and have no landlord - and I could ask who you are. I know we went to college together and struck up a passing acquaintanceship. But is that any excuse for us to spend the rest of eternity being bosom pen friends?
Well, having got that little lot off my chest, how are you, dear? Well, I trust. There's not much news to report. I had a bit of a set to with Clive (that man with "the narrowest eyes in the world" as you so pointedly put it). We almost resorted to fisticuffs. Something to do with rent boys, or something. I didn't really understand (nor want to!). Clive kicked away my crutch and I came tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down... Then it was all forgotten after we came to some sort of arrangement. It wasn't entirely satisfactory either of us - more of a consensus than a full-blooded agreement. I expect you can imagine it. On the other hand, my dear Agnes, perhaps you can't. You really ought to get around more - do you a power of good.
Thinking about it, Clive's children happen to be twins! But how could you possibly have known that?
Any way, must sign off. My eyes are aching. Age I suppose. Pity life's only a leasehold.
Take care, love, Ample.
PS: I nearly forgot - do put this letter in a safer place this time. It's not for just any old eyes. And haven't we just been on holiday together?
#
Dear Ample,
I thought I would write to you before you had the chance to write to me. Non-sequiturs in our correspondence seem to contagious, to say the least. Anyway, it was not me who needed thanking when your spare tyre turned out to be nearly as bad as the one it was taken out to replace.
That nice AA man had a lot still to do when he eventually arrived. I hadn't done the nuts up tight enough, he said. And he certainly got plenty of turn with his large spanner, didn't he? The tyre itself was a bit off, he said, but should get us home.
I was amazed at the way he had such healing hands.
So it's him you need to thank, not me. I was only too pleased to help jack up the car, but it was indeed awful when the ratchet broke and I had to wedge one of my high heels underneath.
The scars and welts in the tread, I agree, were the strangest thing. Why did you have such a dicey wheel in your boot, flayed like slave-lover's flesh - if I can admit to the crazy way I thought about it at the time?
It didn't seem to roll true, either - made too much play on the steering. The AA man warned you about that, but it did indeed take me by surprise when you tried to drive back down the M25 in the wrong direction. Still, you got me home and I trust you did, too, afterwards.
I'm just writing this quickly, because there's something nagging at the back of my mind to relay. Incidentally, rubber burns easily come off, thank goodness. So, please don't think anything of it,
Yours fondly, Agnes.
PS. I hope the reverse gear is now working OK.
#
Dear Agnes,
Despite your wishes, I must thank you for your efforts with the wheel change. The AA man was no more than the cherry on the cake. By the way, I had a "home start" a few days later, and it was the same AA man. Something to do with the boot, he said, but he was pleased to see I'd had a complete tyre change all round, including a new spare.
I must admit I didn't know I had such a heavy load in the boot, but it was straining the suspenders, he said, and making the wheel alignment a little dodgy. I was in fact coming to see you, but with all the turmoil, I decided not to go out at all, after he put it to rights. His name, you know, is Clive Williams and he's coming to give me another push start or something next week, which I probably will need, since the engine's not what it was. I've not been under the bonnet to check it for yonks. I think I might try to sell the thing.
You don't want a run-about, by any chance, do you? Only one affectionate owner!
Must go now, see you on the 5th, if I can make it.
Sweet regards, Ample.
PS. Clive says he'll give you a jolly old homestart, if you need one. Any time.
PPS. Off to my new home, this weekend. Can't say I'm sorry.
#
Dear Ample,
When I heard the revving noise outside this morning, I was convinced it was you. But it was extremely early for a Sunday, almost Saturday night. I hoped it was you as you left no forwarding address. It did not sound exactly like a car's engine. More a tractor or juggernaut. It had gone by the time I went to the curtains to see. There was a stain on the road by daybreak, a patch of oil, no doubt, or something. Then it started to rain heavily and I decided not to go out for a walk.
Why not write to Ample, I thought. I'm bound to discover your address, if I wait long enough. But there's not much here to say. Clive of the AA came round yesterday morning, as promised. I didn't have a membership card, so he said he couldn't by rights give me a home start like he did with you. He said I had a good friend in you, but there wasn't much that could be done about the trouble with your sump.
It's next day now. I had to halt writing yesterday, because of a sudden doubt as to why I was writing at all, not having your new address.
The AA are pretty good, aren't they? Clive had a pick-up truck with him parked outside my house the day before yesterday and a broken-down vehicle and its driver, but Clive still had time to make a detour for my home start. Now, he's here again and will be off soon to deliver this letter to you at your new home, when he's finished mending the washing-machine. It got clogged up with oil, he said.
Funny that Bill knew your new address before I did. Must rush.
Love, Agnes
#
Dear Agnes,
It was good to hear from you via Clive.
He's taking me to the seaside today (Southend, I think) in an AA van convoy. That'll be nice. Southend rings a bell. Have we been there together? I've always liked Welsh men.
It's a nice place this new home, but strangely tatty. The man in charge is on crutches. Never washes. I do miss my independence. What's more, I can't bear such black hands touching the food - specially with all those cuts. Still, I've got the trip to Southend to look forward to. He says I can go on the dodgems. Long as I don't have any head-on's.
Yours forever, Ample.
PS. Remember mum's the word about my RAC membership and our other little secret, of course. I sometimes think that secrets are secret from each other, deep down - playing spies and decoys and so forth with each other. Even our letters can't keep up with them, let alone real life. Thank God for postscripts.
(Published ‘End of the Millennium’ 1998)
THE SOUND OF CHILDREN
With Anthea Holland
The sound of children's laughter washes over the parents who watch fondly as little Johnny jumps on his sister's sandcastle, destroying it in one easy swoop. Around them the beach is full of sun-worshippers, soaking up the cancer-inducing rays as if their life (or lack of life) depended on it - perhaps it does.
Beach balls and air-beds, picnics and sand-flies, everyone is making the most of the unexpected hot spell, grateful they don't have to spend yet another day following indoor pursuits - museums and art galleries are all very well, but you can have too much of a good thing.
Happiness, then, abounds.
But across the bright summer day darkness stalks.
Several blackened flocks of birds swarmed in like the burnt ghosts of some Biblical plague. A solitary yacht on the silent horizon seemed to have a Harrier jet balanced its sail-tip.
Tracy - an Essex girl - stepped from the sweet-wrapper waves, felt her brow, browned by sunblock, and travelled deliberately towards her abandoned towel. There were several strangers kicking sand into her boyfriend's eyes. He seemed uncharacteristically docile. She had experienced, a few weeks before, the sun's partial eclipse on the same beach, with the same little Johnny kicking at the same sister's sandcastle, but then the weird breeze and the subtle darkening had been pleasant enough. But, today, there was a sense to the salt in the air than simple holiday tangs. The darkening was slower, yet deeper. The tacky breeze strangely out of kilter with the yacht's sawing motion. The pleasure pier a thickening daub in someone else's work of art.
As she approached her boyfriend she could see that what she had thought were strangers kicking sand were, in fact, shadows of nearby beach umbrellas. She rubbed a hand across her eyes as if to clear away the image with which they had left her. It was just another symptom of the strangeness of the day.
She cast her mind back to the early morning and decided that everything had been fine then; it was only since coming to the beach this feeling of forth-coming doom had enslaved her. She had swum, hoping to wash away her gloom with the tide, but instead the water had seeped more misery into her skin and through to her blood stream, where she could feel it multiplying along with her corpuscles.
Her towel, awaiting her return, should have been welcomingly cheerful with its bright colours, but the red background today reminded her of blood and the patterns on it resembled piles of vomit.
And Brian, who had appeared so docile in the face of the sand-storm, still seemed quiet; in fact he was dead.
But not quite. The body was moving like a gentle sea-swell, covered as it was by a barely visible canopy of interlocking creatures that had evidently beached themselves upon selected holiday-makers. Several men with knotted hankie-hats and body-tattoos were still standing--bemused, like Tracy. Others, those without tattoos, lay under the same false skin as Brian's, undulating as if with the enjoyment of soft sex. All the women still standing seemed to have tattoos, although more subtle than the men. It was as if the plague or swathe of evil darkness had made a definite choice. Tracy felt her own neck where resided the tiniest mauve love-heart.
Not that she immediately put two and two together. Or tattoo and tattoo. It was only gradually until the full force of the cull became clear.
Meanwhile, as if enjoying a game with his future kids burying him, Brian's body gradually burrowed itself under the sand. As did all the others thus infected by plague.
But where were the other children? The place had been crawling with them before the diseased dark had settled. Tracy looked back towards the sea--silver with an ungodly twilight at the peak of noon--expecting to see bodies floating up and down with the sloshing tide.
Surely the children would have been exempt from this selective thinning out of holiday makers? Not many of them sported tattoos.
But the beach was sullenly quiet, as if waiting for punishment to be metered out in the wake of its misdemeanours. Only the ticking of the sand as it settled round the bodies burrowing beneath the sand remained to break the stillborn silence.
Tracy, her hand still covering the small mark on her neck, as if hiding it would make it non-existent, waited with the beach, holding her breath.
Tracy - herself a local girl - understood why the culling of holiday-makers might be a feasible - necessary even, event. Maybe that was why she had been spared despite the mark on her neck.
Was she confused as to whether the plague wanted fresh, unbranded bodies? Or just those blemished with dot-matrix. Or a mix of both. It little mattered now. She sudddenly recalled that Brian had a stylised totem-pole along the shaft of his penis. How could she have forgotten? And, yes, there was a big black eagle stain on his chest, wasn't there, as if just settled upon its fodder from a fiercesome flock. So, what price tattoos?
The beach still heaved, like bugs beneath the skin, and Tracy wondered where it would all end? Where would the bodies fetch up - Australia?
A vision flashed in her minds of a silent golden beach the other side of the world, suddenly spewing forth bodies like vomit from a young girl's mouth. Let them have the scum, she thought, we don't need them here.
The children, the sound of the children, echoed in her ears as they waded waving from the waves.
(published ‘fantasque’ 2000)
JUST MARRIED
When they entered the town that was tucked away in the French hills, the sky was already closing in with the swelling swags of darkness. He had heard tales of such places where honeymooners were often welcomed with rites enacted under a sailing full moon: as they staggered into the last valley, he told his companion about the pots of wild honey that locals toted from the slanting outward doors of their cellars and they would then force-feed the newlyweds, whilst chanting ribald rhymes. She didn’t believe him of course. He didn’t suopose she listened to his crazy legendeering, for she was more worried about finding lodgings for the night.
Dogs seemed to bay across the valley, from each extremity of the town, as if passing messages of their coming to their snoozing masters. The couple would need to steer clear of the dogs for, unlike in England, rabies was rife hereabouts.
They held hands as they talked among the ghosts of their fears.
“Darling, have you noticed that most French butchers have a skimpy array of dark meat on their slabs, with hardened, dried-out edges. They have no connection with the plentiful variety of English cuts...”
He could have bitten his tongue off: he did not have need to hark back to the argument they had had earlier in the day: he had made her feel sick with speculations on the nature of the meat served uo at the auberge that very lunchtime.
“Dick, please... I still feel queasy... Look! All the lights have gone off in the town all at once.”
In one fell swoop...
“It must be some kind of curfew or blackout.”
It was then that they heard the droning noise and the whirr of wings above them. The last they felt was the blood congealing in their veins. The last they saw were hordes of figures with nets over their faces being led towards them by straining dogs across the dark emerald fields of pruned trees. And the last they heard was the chanting:
“A real live English loving couple,
Let’s oil ‘em, make ‘em supple.
But first, slice off his sting!
Before he sheathes it in her thing...”
(Published ‘Arrows of Desire’ 1989)
FOOD FOR THE PAST
Richard Wiles estimated that his turn would come towards the end of the long day. He had counted at least four hundred individuals being called up to the front, in all manner of dress, some in worse shape than even himself. Some were still in hospital gowns, others in black fresh from a funeral and a few in bandages (the latter being the survivors of a bomb outrage, the distant noise of which they had all heard in the Hall earlier in the day...).
It was difficult not to see how bizarre this would appear to an outsider. The polished, fluted pillars stretched from the varnished parquet floor to the gilded statuary of the far-flung ceiling; the place had the aura of an erstwhile church and the visible smells that the Lance Vicar’s perforated evening star gave off were not very far removed from those various blends of incense and burning spice to which Wiles had grown accustomed as an impressionable, old-fashioned child.
“Healing” was not quite the right word. It was more a cross between confession, the laying on of hands and insurrection... In the candlelight Wiles failed to see where the hands (and whose) were being laid but, sooner or later, he would be called himself.
He heard the thud of another bomb.
Before he could make renewed psychological adjustments, his number was called out on the over-echo of the tannoy; all the faces of those remaining turned round towards him like a scattering of winter moons; he rose from the bench (one that had been used by his ancestors for as many years as the history books record) - but, today, he was the only one left (though, on rising, he had an unexpected fleeting vision of his grandmother sitting at the other end of the bench as a child, with a flowing back of hair, china doll with rosebud lips and bedraggled pinafore sitting on her lap, the eyes of both the child and doll icily staring into the distance, until just the doll blinked...).
And now the bench was empty, a whole dynasty having disappeared.
As Wiles walked tentatively down the gangway, he heard another bomb.. .or an echo of the earlier one … or even a bloom of residual carnage from another war, another history.
Drawing closer to the rostrum, he could see the Voyante swinging a star round her head - and, with an even bigger star hanging like
a pendulum, the Arch Medium Himself; the scented air became headier; his limbs heavier; and the footlights overDowering as he clambered up to the platform, as if boarding a lifeboat from a grey, sliding sea of near death.
The benches behind were now next to empty, he being at the tail end of the proceedings. Therefore, the chants of the congregation had grown thin, leaving the whole ceremony more like a Christian festival from its turn of the two thousand years.
Richard Wiles, with a long bloodline stretching behind like a primordial tail, fanning out cousinwards almost to encompass a whole generation, closed his eyes, relieved at such a gift of darkness, and felt hands about him stroking, massaging, probing, digging, prodding, pluming, fluting, extracting.
Soon he will no longer be Richard Wiles.. .but, before he finally withdrew from that persona, to become just one more cannon-fodder warrior in the Great Wars of History, he glimpsed again his grandmother and her doll. The latter wept.
(published ‘Aklo’ 1989)
MILD CHRISTMAS
It was a mild Christmas.
I had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air - fresher than my mother’s parlour, in any event. Of course, Mum had originally been delighted with the prospect of having us altogether with her for Christmas. My family of wife and children lived with me on the other side of the country, if countries can have sides, or even fronts and backs. I had thus conveniently maintained it was difficult to sort out the logistics for more regular visits. She accepted this, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have lifted up hills to let us through.
I sauntered down the garden path, where, as a small child, I had played at being Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Watching the lugubrious clouds curdle across the near benighted sky, I abruptly noticed a sleigh rough-riding upon an inverted cone of condensation, drawn by a flight of scrawny reindeers with knotted antlers. The occupant of the sleigh was a Plug-Ugly with a scar laddering down his cheek, designer white stubble and a bag marked SWAG on his shoulder. His snow-laced tunic was a syrupy red and thus mightily peculiar in the context.
“Oi! Oi!” he yo-ho-hoed in a snarl, “nobody’s getting presents this year, except for moi!”
I made my way back to my mother’s house thoughtfully. I was indeed somewhat sad because both my children had been killed only a few months before Christmas in a particularly gruesome road accident. My boyhood sweetheart of a wife had since run off with my oldest bestest friend. I wondered if there was anything in the superstition that bad luck came in threes. I vowed to break something valuable when I returned inside the house.
Mum had already made it abundantly clear that she wanted me to stuff the huge turkey ready for tomorrow’s festivities. Pity there would only be place-settings for her and me at the family table. Sellotaped to the front door was the usual three-dimensional plastic image of a jolly old man in a red cape with billowing white beard. Somehow, I could not summon up the rightful Yuletide spirit. Yet, before entering, I planted a false smile upon my lips, so as not to let the side down.
Later, as we prepared for an early night, my mother announced: “I’m going to leave a nice glass of Sherry and a warm mince pie in the fireplace for Father Christmas.” I nodded absent-mindedly.
(published ‘Drift’ 1998)
A BEACON TO ThE DEAD
With Kirk S King
The man was a beacon to the dead. Wherever he went, or whatever he was doing, the spirits of the past would always be with him.
* * *
It had been a long time since Reuben had looked into a mirror and seen only his own reflection, decades ago when his eyes hadn’t seemed so deep, his facial structure so gaunt. But the passage of the years, the added burden of celestial beings vampirishly stripping him of vigour and enthusiasm, and the constant one-show-a-night at the carnival had turned Reuben Into a person who, to say the least, was haunted.
Spoons, depending on whether he was staring into the convex or concave side, systematically stretched or compressed the apparitions. Snippets of ghost faces pressed into his periphery field of vision when walking past display windows and the sun caught the the glass in a certain light. And looking-glasses brought them on full force.
He could no longer leave the safety of the carnival world and enter into the cities where the tents had been pitched. For dark places, dark souls, inhabited almost every corner; in cities there were many faint marks on the pavements where people had lost their lives.
They would come to him, these wraiths, because after his accident, he had stepped over the boundaries which separated life from death, had seen beyond and had come back with part of that beyond wedged firmly in his mind and heart. He was a doorway to the dead and they came to him to watch the world they had lived in.
* * *
Reuben left his trailer to make his way through the carnival, past the sneering buskers and over to the tent where he would perform an act of wonder. His whip was under his arm and his steps were brisk.
The night held frost in the air and the people who wandered around the carnival, attracted by the calls of the barkers, all wore the heavy pelts of dead animals. Reuben, however, was always cold for he carried around with him the chill of perpetual death.
Bright silver from the quarter moon soon spread across the roiling menagerie of wild people, but Reuben cast no shadow.
His stomach twitched a sickening reminder as he passed the Hall of Mirrors, but he did not look at the wooden facade. He had nearly gone insane in there, all those reflected surfaces distorting his burden. Spooks, spectres, shades and spirits doubling, tripling, large and small, all cramming into his sight, mouths open but forever silent. Ghosts and gooks and ghoulies and grannies seeping into his pervious body, expanding him, pumping him up with other people’s ex-lives; and it was all too much, just too goddamn much.
The barker, a dwarf who worked for Reuben, gave a cursory nod to his boss as he reached his own tent. Inside, the audience were
shuffling with anticipation.
It was time, for the last performance of the summer season, to do
his show.
Reuben ignored the lumpen mass into which the audience had merged in the relative darkness outside his own podium. He looked down at his feet where a slowly evolving bubble of opalescent skin began to bloat, pump in rhythm to his heart - a visual conjuring trick, the audience assumed, one through which they could still discern Reuben even as it tumified further.
“Let me present you to a dream without a dreamer,” crooned Reuben as he indicated thIs misshapen balloon of mucus-like pulsing transparency. He cracked his whip and immediately there appeared some monstrous, if humanoid, creatures within the wobbly shimmering sac. Each entity sucked vigorously at its own appendages, as if desperate to retrieve them as rightful bodily innards.
The audience cooed out a laughed-off fear and continued to listen
to Reuben. “This is not illusion, I assure you, but a real dream – so close your peepers, nuncles and naunts, and you’ll still see it!”
The coos became screams, yet still within the range of of screams
screeched by fairwell funsters on the carnival’s frightening joyrides.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that is not quite all, however.” Reuben’s voice had become less a showman’s bravado, more that of a priest suddenly realising his Mass was Black not White. “This is the dream of the dead - and its prophylactic skin near covers us all ...”
The audience’s terror reflected off rippling mirrors of light and seared the ears even more than it did the eyes; for with knowledge also came responsibility, a noblesse oblige so pure that it had power to change one’s predestined form. The tent had now swollen into one vast empurpled gland and within it a contesseration of corpse-skinned beasts yowled and yowked for an exit ... or at least a waking.
Laughing with joy at the foreknowledge he would soon be free, Reuben himself managed to burst from his own cadaverous body, using the shoulders as lever and purchase - the skin rippling like a magician’s trick with newspapers, only to put them together again seconds later, to lie crumpled on the sawdust floor.
* * *
Reuben was gradually aware of the frost glistening upon the dark untenanted constituents of a carnival not dissimilar from the one he had left. With the beacon finally quenched, he ranged free amid dreamerless dreams, yet often hearing distant barkers and the odd rattle of a husker’s spoons - escaping the dead, yes, even if dead himself.
(published ‘Peeping Tom’ 1994)
THE LAST RING
When the phone rang, I knew it was the call for which I had long been waiting. Although I was in no way a self-starter - with very little affinity towards saleswork - I had, nevertheless, pulled out all the stops at the job interview: demonstrating that, if I could sell myself I could sell just about anything.
But I had since realised that I must draw a line at trading secrets - not that I was morally in two minds about selling items of knowledge to some parties whom other parties wanted deprived of such items. Indeed, the owners of secrets were nothing to me. My concern, purely for the sake of tidiness in the hierarchies of facts, was for the well-being of the secrets themselves. Secrets being unsuspecting, innocent, human-dependent creatures, I felt duty-bound to keep them thus. Keep them safe. Yes, keep them secret. Sacrosanct.
The nature of secrets, however, is not something that can be broadcast in this way. Hence, there is a need to enshrine them in a piece of fiction, one that nobody will treat seriously, if they indeed read it in the first place, bearing in mind my inability to write readably. Obliquity and opacity are the only feasible clarities, the only tenable transparencies of meaning - because we are surrounded by secrets. The bottom-line secret of such secrets is their existence as autonomous creatures who are, in turn, secret from each other - pigeonholed, ringfenced and circumscribed. Only my words are imprecise enough to convey the secret of secrets, without actually breaking it. Normal words would be see-through and, therefore, unsuitable for keeping secrets separate within the overall conspiracy field. So, when the phone rings, the self-starter stalls, fearing that he has only been given the job as a result of overselling his skills at selling secrets. So he turns down the dimmer-switch of his first person singular soul: to deafen the phone, to fence off the fiction from fact, to eggshell the dream within its ring of reality. The feel of feelers inside his skull, no doubt waking secrets. No doubt, no am. No insulation, no birth.
Discrete secrets. Discreet secrets. They have more to sell than simple fact: filling otherwise empty words with the stuffing of meaning. Padded word. Padded sale. Padded cell. 0.
(published ‘Oasis’ 1996)
STRIPLING WELHAM
When Stripling Welham left England to attend the convention of European lavatory men in Combourg, France, he did not know what to expect. Most of his days, he had been in charge of all the men and women who toted night soil for disposal from the Stynke Tanks of the endemic terraced twouptwodowns of rural England; now, with the coming of water closets, he wanted to be the pioneer in such esoteric toilet lore and bring new sanitary hope to the working class; where better than go toVictorian France for the convention … or so he thought.
The ferry docked at St Malo. Stripling Welham was intrigued to see the convoy of pump-out lorries that turned up at the dockside to empty the lower decks of the passengers’ discarded slurry; he had heard they were rollonrolloff ferries, so this was particularly intriguing (and instructive), not all what he had been led to expect.
He was met by the Lavatory Men Convention Luxury Coach which would take the English contingent to Combourg. On board, he teamed up with one by the name of Padgett Weggs, who was actually masquerading as a lavatory man so as to smuggle himself into France where, he had been told, he could obtain a pretty good living as a professional dosser.
They had seen each other on the ferry, but it was only now they could have a chinwag. At first, Stripiing was phased by the hygiene arrangements on the coach, which depended on a rather complicated system that led to its being churned up by the wheels upon the road surface ... leaving a series of quite pretty tyre-patterned pancake-pats along the road behind it.
PW: Hiya, Stripling, I don’ know why yerve come over ‘ere. Us Englanders ‘ave forgot more about shit clearance in the good ol’ green and pleasan’ land back home than these ‘ere froggywoggies will ever know in the first place.
SW: [Waking fitfully from his bemusement] I don’t know why you say that. They wouldn’t be holding the convention in this country, if that were so.
PW: Well, public jacksies over ‘ere, I been told by the King of Dossers hisself in Picallili Circus, are offen tin huts, where men ‘ave to stand holding out their willies in full view as they piss in the rusty, sludgy troffs .... and women passin’ by to their own part of the contraption. What’s more, an’ I don’ rightly know how ol’ King Doss knew this, but in the women’s cubbyhoies, they do have to stand leanin’ agin the walls as if they’re in the act of natr’al childbirth. Gor blimey, Strip, in Combourg itself, they’re sizzlin’ hot dogs just outside... hopin’ the smoke will either ease out the consummation inside the lav or the ripe ol’ stench itself commin from the troffs will help steep and marrynate the sossages in more than jus’ lard.
SW: Come off it, this is nothing but hearsay.
PW: Well, yerve ‘eard it said, so it must be true.
When the coach arrived at Combourg, Stripling quickly found that its only public convenience bore out Padgett’s theories. Also, another delegate to the convention had warned him that he would have to be wary of the flushing systems which could easily explode over friend and foe alike.
SW: What’s a flushing system, Meinheer?
Other DeZegate (German): Veil, ve’ve had flushings in Bonn since pre-Wictorian times, vhere vater cascades like niagra and zooms the how’s yer father, as you zay in Engerland, down the pipes clean avay.
SW: Is this the W.C. system we’ve come to hear about?
OD: V.C., Mister Vilham? Waste Cruncher, you mean - we got rid of all such inhuman processes in the dark ages...
SW: No, no, Meinheer, water closets born under a different star sign than the common or garden earth closets, I’m told. I think what you describe as flushings must be something to do with Cancer, Scorpion or Pisses...
[At this moment, Padgett Weggs the dosser sat down next to them in the convention hall, having decided to stick around a bit to see what he could pick up and maybe recruit an apprentice dosser or two.]
PW: [Noting that SW and OD were deep in technical interchange, decided to lighten their load.] Hey! Fellers, I’ve ‘eard tell that they goin’ to give a demo on the platform ‘safternoon ... with audience partici-pation. [He laughed like a drain as he motioned vigorously.]
OD: [Ignoring PWs interpolation] Excusez-moi, I’m just off to have, vhat you call in Engerland, a vee vee.
SW: And I’m going to the convention souvenir shop before the first lecture to see if I can purchase some duty-free incontinent underwear.
Stripling Welham of course could not buy any such thing, being where he was. And when he later found that all the lectures and demonstrations were in French, he returned to good old England the next day on board the packet ship. Which cut short a pretty tall story.
(published ‘Odyssey’ 1990)
DARE THE MEMORY
‘Think of the most dangerous thing in the whole world and then go and do it.’
‘Playing Dares with you - and I’m already doing it!’
The two children squatted in the corner of the playground. The small girl whose response was so precocious smiled innocently whilst preparing to suck her thumb again - a great comforter in times of stress. The even smaller boy looked at the place where his thumb used to be. He had lost it in an accident as a baby. The healed stump looked more like something he’d seen in the poulterers.
The whistle went for the end of Break. The two children scampered off in different directions to find their own toilets before resuming class.
The boy washed his hands thoroughly, studying each joint for dirt. He wondered what it was like inside the girls toilet: he imagined smarter fittings, proper waste paper bins with pedal lids, longer chains and troughs with unchipped enamel.
He rushed off towards lessons to prevent his lateness becoming obvious. The teacher would be concealed by billowing chalk-dust, thus giving the boy an opportunity to sneak in unseen. His girl friend, as he liked to think of her, was already ensconced in the double desk, its sloping lids covered in thousand year doodles. She smiled as he climbed into his seat next to her. They often pretended being in the cockpit of a spaceship, but today it was more like a proper desk than ever before. The gloomy winter light seemed to lend a greater reality to reality itself rather than to the dreams.
The teacher emerged like a Hammer Film monster from between the white clouds of the blackboard. The dreams were back with a vengeance. The coiled cane was released sporadically from under the wings of his cape like a lizard’s tongue. The mortar board made him look like a human snail who’d had an argument with a flying saucer ...
Whe the boy had grown out of the Sixties as well as the desk and become a full-fledged man, he often thought back to those times when he’d played Dares with his own thoughts. The worse one was the half-premonition of a middle-aged, belly-bloated individual who worked for an insurance company. It was enough to make his younger self curl up into a ball and suck his only thumb.
The small girl had committed suicide - discovered one day hanging from a chain in the playground toilet, the skin on her back welted red by the plaster wall and thumb plugged down her throat.
Thankfully, time had eased the memory for him.
(published ‘Rattler’s Tale’ 1992)
MRS PANEGYRIC’S HAUNTING MELODIES
Mrs Panegyric what she called herself. I've guessed the spelling - and the pronunciation. I've guessed her motives, too.
She was a saleswoman by temperament. I could easily imagine her on a medicine-wagon, propped up at the front poising a whip over a scrawny cart-horse - and the words Mrs Panegyric’s Haunting Melodies emblazoned on the side. But her only wares were small jars (like containers for skin cream) filled with a sludgy grey liquid which, if you inhaled its fumes, supplied your head with hankering harmonies and tunes as soft and smooth and comforting as a beautiful woman's inner thigh: mellifluous musings of sound that were as distant from real music as faith was from doubt - and were independent of that particularly intrusive medium which made bed-fellows of ears and hearing. Or that was what she claimed.
I met her at an Auction in the local Community Hall. She took an immediate shine to me and, after a smattering of small talk, told me many secrets none of which, however, allowed me to plumb her true motives. She was a side attraction which did not participate in the Auction proper - and I helped her sell the many little standing jars. Not that she really needed help. I was more moral support. A sympathetic ear. Or perhaps someone whom the potential purchasers of her purveyances knew and trusted.
The whole thing was a scam, of course, which was understandable, if not excusable. Most people were so confused, they couldn't distinguish an elephant from a packet of tea. and Mrs P knew that I knew that her “skin cream” pots of so-called music were a scam, since we were in near perfect harmony: two resonating souls who spoke with some bass rhythm underneath the small talk and the false secrets.
She had promised me a share of the takings. Nothing had been put in writing, but the likes of Mrs P exuded honesty. That's why so many punters exchanged their recession-diluted earnings for her china phials of sweet sweet sound - without testing them first. You see, we told the poor suckers that the full benefit would only come with the very first sniff and, for full enhancement of effects, such an act needed to be held in the quietness of their own bedrooms. Subsequent sniffs would simply supply second-rate reverberations - but that did not matter since the first sniff would have its own snowball of echoes rolling from here to death's door. What a hoot! I pitied, yet scorned, the sorry simpletons who stashed their vaselets within inner pockets and traipsed home for a snort.
Despite such a sting, we had no belly-aching punters traipsing back to the Auction Hall. Perhaps, they were ashamed of being gulled. Or the punters were still studiously sampling snifters from their urnlings, desperate for the effects to start - and, by the time, they surrendered all hopes, Mrs P (and, hopefully, me) would have scarpered. Or the punters are keeping it for a special day, like Christmas. Or they intend it for a secondary sucker down the line. Or a gift for a small child's special birthday. Or, even, the punters were hypnotised by Mrs Panegyric, beguiled into honey-bee sounds of bewilderment, besotted into belief. Or the damn stuff actually worked!
Yet, I lie because - as the auctioneer's repetitive exhortations to budding bidders minimalised the music in day's random noises - we did have one belly-acher who returned to our stall with his screw-topped vessel clasped in his sweaty palm. Not a complaint so much - rather someone seeking clarification as to our claims. He told us that his hearing had suffered from a noisy case of tinnitus for many years: a disorder to which, I understand, those more long in the tooth are prone. He was indeed older than Mrs P and myself put together. Having sampled one inhalation in his bedroom, yes, music had come, he said, as if the chronic tinnitus was being tuned by angels and remixed for harp - the organic clash and clangour and intermittent tinkles harmonised and transcribed in some heaven he hadn't believed existed, until today. But, why did it make him also sense that his life in the here and now was a dream? He had previously trusted that reality was something you could touch or see or smell or hear. Now he had a nagging doubt. He sensed an encroaching non-existence of self. Why had we not warned him about such a side effect? Was it dangerous? Had his tinnitus filtered the full effect?
He shrugged on realising he was talking to himself and slowly shambled from the hall. Mrs P had already vanished, you see: going, going, gone, to the sound of gavel-strains. But all this of course was now hearsay and I couldn't even guess my own motives, because there was nobody left to guess. Naturally, I would have refunded the punter's money from my own pocket had I myself not earlier snatched a surreptitious sniff of the stuff, when Mrs P was off for a P.
(published ‘Odyssey’ 1996)
NIGHTSTOKERS
She had her back to Thomas - and dressed by darkness or, rather, in darkness. Yet he knew who she was: the creature who had haunted his dreams - assuming it were not rude to call a lady a creature. Not only in his dreams but also in waking life, causing both to be infiltrated by the other: dream masquerading as waking life and vice versa: all shades and permutations of real and unreal reality, to such an extent that even Thomas had to doubt his own existence - which, he guessed, would end up his only way out. She slowly turned toward him. Yet her front was no different from her back, except he discerned a slit-smile of
darkness where he would have positioned her mouth, given a free hand. Yes, her mouth, with two lip-hooks that must have been so blindingly white their night spawned negative caused blackness that appeared dark red. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to waking, they locked to hers: and he wondered whether his were similarly tinged with a self-lit spirit of spiteful playfulness. “You knew I would come in person, one day.” The voice of seething honey bees moved the black mouth - with lips that began to glisten as Thomas tutored his eyes further in wakefulness. He nodded: a ludicrous action in the circumstances, until it dawned on his full consciousness that his sub-conscious must have known that she could see in the dark. “Come nearer.” She tried to mimic Thomas’ voice: she knew it was unseemly for a lady to make all the running, hence this strangely transparent ploy. This time he shook his head: to clear it of waking-induced inhibitions or, perhaps, as a sign that whatever they had done during dreams, he would not now countenance a heavy handed dalliance nor even grant an inconsequentially light petting of their various sensitive zones. Whatever the case, he did not dare dwell on the true nature of the creature. And in a saner world, the most acceptable outcome was he haunted himself. Yet, as the creature’s mouth moved away from its eyes by the space of a feasible torso, Thomas experienced the real relativity of sanity. He told the night-shaped formlessness that he not only doubted his own and the creature’s existence but also that of a third party (me?) who colluded in their existence. Such doubt lasted until, empurpled enough to outdo the darkness, my single-hooked chimney mouth, one not unaccustomed to the moon slow rhythm of blood-flow, yawned awake - then sucked them both up.
(published ‘Velvet Vampyre’ 1993)
THE HEALING PROCESS
Purple Patch: an exotic plot, a royal flower-bed, a strange plaster, a remarkably rich tranche of prose or, more likely, a hardy poem-plant that I – not a poet, really – have managed to tangle round with my dark weeds for many a turning season. Yet, now, here is another multi-leaved clover, pricking out amid the many stapled blooms that have cloistered me with more welcome fulsomeness than simply the words their petals grew. I’m glad, then, to have added to the texture. Today, ready painfully for unsticking the plaster patch to see if I’m healed or not.
(published ‘Purple Patch’ 2001)
WAITING
The world waits for its call. Why everybody thinks their time is well spent in waiting, I do not know, and may God forgive them for using their life up in such a fashion.
I was one of them once. I had great yearnings to stand in bus queues, sit in dentists’ or doctors’ waiting-rooms, lining up for ticket returns at the smash hit performance, forming part of an endless snake as it winds round the London streets for yet another Tutankhamen exhibition....
Now I’ve grown out of all that, my deepest relish is making others wait. Now I’m famous (shot to fame in fact because I went on all the TV chat shows claiming that I was the one who had waited longest for most things which, when all added up on Balancing Day, would be tantamount to more than the average lifetime). I give everybody the runaround: my agent, my live-in lover, my publisher, my private doctor, even the buses on occasion stay at the request stop longer than they should until I arrive, cohorts in tow.
I wish I had made them wait longer! It would have given some modicum of fairness to the end of time accounts.
I died yesterday and I’m still waiting for death to put me out of my misery. That’s why I’ve got the time to doodle with words. Even the undertaker is getting fed up, still in his black top hat, kicking his heels, his hearse idling....
(published ‘Tuba’ 1988)
OPENING TIME
“There’s nothing spooky about people who tell spooky stories.”
You could have fooled me, I nearly replied. The man, who was a little the worse for wear from drink, stared at me. In any event, we both leaned closer to the roaring fire - and even the man seemed to be listening to his own stories for the first time. There was something hypnotic about his intoning words which caused no further need of preamble - and, indeed, there had been next to no scene-setting at all, bar the fire, so his were effectively the only stories - ones that did not need speech to mark the tolerances of the listener’s belief nor vocal clues as to the suspension of routine reality.
He simply told about ghosts, or rather about one ghost, or possibly none, except there seemed to be at least two ghosts at the time. There were, of course, many ghosts around that roaring fire - situated in what at first gave the appearance of being a bar in a pub, somewhere in the city. There was the sound of heavy traffic in the distance together with the sporadic war-chantsof newspaper-sellers. There were no customers, or none to speak of. The joint was shut, but just about to open, judging by the height of the fire. The spirit bottles gleamed darkly above their optics.
The noise of the bar-staff gathered off-stage. And the souls of dead regulars held forth with crazy pub taik, even crazier than when they were alive - except it was now less than silence (the only way to tell it).
But stories have to be about something, with plottable moments and degrees of suspense derived from character or situation. I feared them devoid of all such interests. The only possible interest was in wondering how a story could actually continue without any interest, except perhaps for the potential revelations which uneventfulness often bred: romance, mystery or conspiracy upon the brink of resolution.
The flames of the fire spoke spooks louder than thoughts, with irritated crackles and ambitious armies of sparks marching up the chimney like deaths in the making.
I had indeed been part of a romance that once set this pub alight, but I died during the long drawn-out kiss, wrapped in the arms of a drunk man whom I had loved before he became drunk. Perhaps it was me who made him get drunk. There was very little to differentiate guzzlers from ghosts. Both with too much spirit. Yes, spirit, since I had an emptiness in the heart and glinting dark tears of such spirit at the invisible eyes. Bottled out of spooking, so to speak.
And so slowly spake the stories, those dreams without a dreamer.
He went in one end, knowing it was not going to be an easy ride on the ghost train, but at the other, as he came out into the daylight, blinking like mad, it had been worse than his worst fears. Even worse though was when he came out the other side with no mind left to recognise the horror for what it had been. But what he did realise was it had not been a ghost train at all.
He had entered his own pet metaphor of a tunnel during one of his mid-life crises. He was going out with a woman who said she liked nothing better than taking someone of his nature in hand. She thought he had the makings of a successful man, but he failed to channel his efforts correctly. She had him spruced up, made him change his underwear, told him to shave almost to the bone, preened and quiffed his hair and set him walking in the right direction, straight for what he would have earlier considered to be the cliff-edge of success. And, indeed, it took a lot of guts to draw back at the last moment, for when he saw the sea creaming on the crags way below, his instinct told him things were not quite right.
He turned round to see her waving at him (as she often did in his dreams too), motioning him to proceed. He shook his head, causing his eyeballs to rattle around like squidgy dice inside the skull. The taste of fear was tantamount to eating his own corpse.
But he was more upset than scared. He trusted the woman, since she had turned him out of her bed a new man. He even felt desire again. In fact, he would go as far as to say that she was the first woman really to turn him on. Generally, breasts were two a penny. But here, they were larger than life. And the way she moved under him, it was a sense of riding horseback in a circus where a ring-master kept his best whips for the man rather than the mount.
Now, it needed all his will-power to dredge some small particle of a real personality from the macho meaninglessness and humdrum heroism that his mind had become. He needed to re-establish himself as the wimp which she had originally found in him. To stand up to her, he needed to slop around once more in that miasma of lost chances that underlied everybody’s destiny. That was the greatest courage: to reconcile such absurdity with life. It would be like holding up a crucifix to her face of gritted teeth and double-edged eyes. And such self-negation effectively made him feel the resurgence of power. He sensed his muscles moving into place like cartridges into the barrel of a hair-trigger gun. The brain-cells became light and airy places.
In sum, his confidence fed off the lack of confidence that once threatened to swamp it. Thus, she had made him into a child of her times, moulded him from the soggy clay of a human being and fired him in the belly of her kiln.
Emerging from the tunnel of edge-to-edge blinkers, he leaped from the cliff-edge into the rocking weed-choked oceans of mindless ambition. But even that release was denied him, since he eventually became conscious of being more macho and heroic than it was possible for anyone to be. He actually enjoyed mastering the woman who had created his new persona and, so, by overcoming her power over him, by becoming more powerful than her, he knew with anguish that he had given her the ultimate irresistible power she had wanted all the time: the power to change the unchangeable.
He always had to be given a drink from a cup with a baby’s spout, to prevent the dribbling down, the dribbling down his pinafore dress. Even when he was 42.
It’s awonder I can bring myself to tell you all this, for I was his mother for most of his life. But let me start at the end, because that will give you some perspective to what really went on. I had lived, as you know, through several of the war years, dodging the forking of the blitzkrieg over old London Town, to such an extent that the tube platforms still bear the pattern of my bum.
Many years later, he died under a train, as it entered Angel station.
He was born about a year after the end of the war in Walton-on-the-Naze. In any event, I know it was near the sea because, during my confinement, I grew used to hearing the waves beating the rocks. So, it may not have been precisely Walton-on-the-Naze, but that will do.
As soon as he emerged, a number of minutes following the original afterbirth, he crawled across the parquet floor, caterwauling in, what they later told me, was Ancient Egyptian. And all his first few weeks were spent doodling on waste paper - a calligraphy (if that was the word) of a two-dimensional universe which seemed sufficient to house the reality of his early years: stylised pecking birds, opposing arrows, beckoning hand-prayers, bewhiskered eyes, erect members...
I walloped him hard to bring him back to his senses, but I really knew that it was he who should have walloped me for my ignorance. He grew too big for the play-pen. Used his cot as a second toilet. Threw the nappies, that I offered him, straight back into my face.
The house contracted worms. Instead of the intestines ofa child whose mother had not yet been taught that cleanliness is tantamount to godliness, the worms escaped their berth in his lower abdomen and treated the kitchen as if it were a fish-bait tin. I tried scalding them to death - I had seen my own mother pouring water from her bed-bottle directly on ant-heaps - but, being hard-up, we tried eating their still writhing bodies, post cooking, and they used this opportunity to set up home again, since they evidently thrived on stomach acid. And my son, he smiled, for he would only eat fish fresh from the sea.
Then he told me of another like him who lived in nearby Southend-on-Sea: one whose worms were more manifold, who was a reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian who had not believed in reincarnation. So, there was some sorting out to be done - there was an angry throwback, thus thrashing about in the county of Essex, before the Dartford Tunnel outlet had been conceived, let alone constructed.
We boarded a green Eastern National bus from Colchester. How we arrived there in the first place, I cannot even remember - perhaps we walked the 18 miles from the Naze, via Weeley, or was it Kirby Cross, but, looking back on it, from the distance of old age if not hindsight, it may be that we hitched a lift in an old Ford Popular whose driver had stayed at home, for fear of the traffic on modern roads.
My son, as ever, was travel-sick. By the time we reached Rayleigh (or it may have been Jaywick Sands), the side of the bus was streaked with how’s-yer-father and red custard. It reminded me of the Nazi (or was it Nazey) planes over St Paul’s during the war for, as they were going so fast, the pilots had exploded and shitlered us oe’r...
Jaywick is a funny place. It has a special Council department who distributes broken bottles over the beaches, to attract the right calibre of tourists. Grape-picking in France, during the endless student days of post-war Europe, had nothing on the laying waste of the shantytowns of the East coast of England in the 50’s and 60’s.
We never reached Southend, as you have probably guessed, from all my procrastination (if that’s the right word). We stayed in Jaywick for, it seemed, a lifetime. My son grew up into an existence that had been destined for him - and that other one in Southend whom we had been seeking went off to University with a pal from Bexhill, and that University was near an even more downtrod seaside place up North.
They say (don’t you?) that if there is another war, it will be us on the East coast who will bear the brunt. We have already sown the groynes and piers with barbed wire and, late at night, you can hear the groaning growth of rust.
My son? He spends all his time fishing, using bait from my stomach. I’m good as dead to him.
It was not he then at the age of 42 who dropped acid and fell in front of a train entering Angel tube station. A case of mistaken identity since, being dead, he had to be force-fed with a baby’s spout. And, while the body was being picked up by a task force of striking ambulance men, the dossing refugees on the platform mouthed obscenities in a language so ancient it was dead - a ceaseless mumbling and mewling along those tunnels which sheltered them from a war that must have ended years before.
A son is always a son to a loving mother, whatever he does or becomes. And a mother is always a mother even when way way beyond the barbed margins of an enemy country called Death.
As I lay awake, brimming over with baby. I listen to the waves, not beating the rocks, but dribbling down dribbling down.
The lawn is crawling with large batches of shuttling wings, each a squirming mass of flying ants, moving as if with one mind.
Why they have decided to emerge from the ground nests (or have they just landed from layers of sky?) on this particular day in August is a mystery to one as simple-minded as I. Have other lawns in this area a similar infestation? Am I sitting upon one vast dynamic ant bank, the ill-manicured green sward being merely a thin veneer over the black-seamed pulsings of a creature which, at one moment, is constituted of swarms of self-sufficient insects, but, at another, is a single entity waiting to break free from Earth’s chains and feed off human corpses?
That finishes the story, in many ways, if a story it can be called. That’s because it takes place in the finite present moment, when questions can never be answered. The only way to answer the call of the plot is to inform any likely reader of what the future holds. It takes a very special cross-breed of story teller to attempt such a sticky feat. OK, OK, I know some authors have tried to predict what they see as the future and spun catherine-wheels of yarn from such tentative projections of plot, for the benefit of those foundling generations of wide-eyed readers who have a taste for structured fantasising. However, what I am trying to get at, is an ability to tell the future as it REALLY is.
The web of cobbled alleyways radiates from the domed Cathedral which was once called St Pauls. Between the alleyways, the tall wedge-sectioned buildings lean like the ancient warehouses which they were constructed to mirror in a miscegenation of nostalgia and history. Trundle-rattlers weave routes along the byways, toting cargoes of insects tended by other insects.
If I am not too much mistaken, I am the only human being alive (the word “being” used as a doing rather than a naming word). I wonder how the Cathedral has withstood the domino-rally entropies to which everything else human-bred has long since succumbed.
My name is Carapace (I was told that was how the White Spider baptised me when I was extruded from my latest mother) and I really believe I am the last creature able to walk on its hindlegs without overbalancing. They keep me in this zoo-trap, to remind them of pre- and para-history, in case they forget. It spurs them to curtail the cycles.
The insects are larger than life now, with clicking nodules. You are only aware of their existence within the dome’s spinning darkness because their mandibles scrape together and the segments ratchet along their wagging probosces: as well as, I suppose, the light of the sporadic lonely moon glinting off their steely hardbacks.
And so the future finishes too: fizzles out: worse than the ending provided by the present. Without a good finale, the story itself is wasted, however true and/or interesting its web of plot-threads. It’s a pity the story has to end with a full stop at all.
Beyond future’s end, there lies the real fantasy.
I live among real men again: men who fight each other tooth and claw as a kind of past-time or hobby or role-playing game, much as children used to play ‘dares’.
The lawns stretch into the distance and, on the horizon. I can discern the tiny hive-like dome of St Pauls sparkling in the light of the re-born sun. I dream, at night, of this sun’s final re-enactment of its rhythmic deaths, for one last show on the stage of reality, and I can see the innards of the Cathedral being clogged with undulating whiplash feelers, all emanating from a bulging sac of white pus lodged upon the ancient altar ... which could be Earth’s brain, but is more than likely just an inexplicable Jungian symbol created by a story teller with more ability (or pretentiousness) than my-self.
The days grow longer and less tenable. Humans have passed away into their own past-times. The seasons have become changeling generations of cross-pollination. The seemingly endless lazy hot days of August stretch and yearn into Carapace’s long memory of forgotten dreams, awakening the maggot-riddled cadaver that he must have once become: and the hazes of flying insects fill the golden air, turning the whole tableau into an impressionist’s beautiful marginless painting -
The tower was full of gobbling sounds. Even back of the outhouses, beyond the moat systems, one could hear them.
The day I arrived I had expected to see what they had led me to believe: a fine imposing structure, standing tall between the headland and the tor. But, if you fail to imagine my surprise when I caught sight of a simple crofter’s cottage backing on to what looked like an airport hangar which then grew out of the half-finished monolithic tower itself, I in my turn would not be surprised.
I had been brought up to believe the mediaeval realities which the history books would reflect for centuries to come. And, if not for my discovery of such an outlandish edifice, I would have lived and died in such ignorance - and, after all, death is indeed just another form of ignorance.
In any event, one of its inhabitants found me lurking beneath a large animal, when night was about.
“I suppose you’re there because its udder is your hot water bottle, upstart.”
“Sorry, my good sir, but I did not want to disturb your supper.”
His face flushed close to mine: “Give me a rest! You’re here to cause me grief, I’ll be bound. Muck and mayhem are the cargo of the likes of you, no fear. I don’t know who sent you, but nestling there under the breasts of my grazer, you were no doubt going to suckle the night away, draining her of a whole winter’s milk-letting!”
I was at a loss for a moment, but decided to give it to him straight: “They told me your tower was a mighty castellated wonder of the Mediaeval world. Instead of which, here I am, squeezing my eyes up against a sickly sight - buildings, snatched from various god-forbidden eras which, even where they should have belonged or would have done, do toss and tussle from roof to dungeon in belated attempts to better themselves!”
The man blanched, as if he were ashamed of something I’d said. Called away from the tower, along with his bluff, he was fast becoming what I should have recognised all along: a sack of flesh. riddled with doubts and evidently now tangled and tongue-tied.
I continued: “You’re no better than an outhouse beast yourself. You stink (as well as pray) to high heaven. And I bet the halls you’ve just left are crammed with others, even fouler than you...”
My monologue continued for as long as I could keep it up, until I became lost in my own non-sequiturs, paradoxes, dead-ends and ridiculous tangents upon tangents.
Given half the chance, he enjoyed conversing as much as me. He eventually told me that the tower was crawling with men and women who pursued an almost ever lasting roisterous roundelay of blind encounter, self-perpetuating coprophagy, safe cannibalism and other forms of creative love-play. Those naughtier than most (or sillier, or grown too senile even for death, or downright wicked) were expelled to the outhouses from where they could look back in awe, across the moated canals, towards what was called the Tower of Turdhelm ... knobbling all over, as it continued to be, with wayward annexes.
I forced him (and his grazer) to play pat-a-cake, ring o’ orchids, bone-loaning games, leaning-dances, elbow-fights and, finally, the-last-one-alive-is-a-dead’un, until there was a silence in which even the gobbling had ceased. It was then I realised, with a frozen smile, that true History could only be told by such primary sources as the illiterate dead.
The poet who couldn’t write - I first met him in a pub, down by Thames Side, and he was the first to admit that he was drunk. Though drunkards are rarely dependable.
“You want me to tell you about old Dell?” were the first words with which he opened the conversation. All I could do was nod but, even now, I’m unsure to whom he was referring.
“Well, I first met him in a University north of here. It was towards the end of that decade now called the Sixties...”
The pub was to shut in about half an hour (for licensing hours were still thankfully observed), and he continued, ignoring my pointed attempts at intervention: “He was a bit of a beardy-weirdy, that Dell - I suppose that’s the best way of describing him. He toted a shotgun to student union meetings and if it were not for the likes of me, I’m sure he’d now be a hunted man as well as a haunted one.”
I couldn’t resist raising my eyebrows a notch or three, but I put it down to the drunkenness which had pervaded his brain more than hewas now able to admit. But he still continued: “Anyway, Dell, that was his name, though I bet you anything if he was tracked down today, he’d not own up to it. He’d pretend he’s somebody else, even if it meant laying claim to the opposite gender. He last wrote back in the early Seventies (when nobody had even heard of such a decade) and told me that he still held precariously to his self belief. But the world, now quite beyond his jurisdiction, was growing younger day by day, and thus in parallel he was fast becoming a buffer of the last water...
And he interrupted his own gossip, as he dug inside his flies to produce a sickly-looking toadstool: he sprayed cider towards the fruit machine in the corner - which shorted and hacked into circuits that set its own nudge against hold, by passing the gamble which reared its unlikely head between - a facsimile of life itself, I mused.
The lights flashed. Last orders were announced. And I knew that if it didn’t all come out now, the story would stay just that, another piece of pub talk for nobody to take seriously except perhaps on another night with another drink in our hands. I visited the bar to obtain his final drink. As I landed it in front of him with a pecker of pork scratchings (since, he’d told me, his tummy muscles were in overbite), I asked him what his last word was on the matter.
He replied inaudibly: “My dreams are sweeter than most. And the dream I cherish most, the one that has yet even to be dreamt, is of that Dell who has probably forgotten about the University where we once met in an era that deserved to be called an era rather than the nondescript tranche of years called the present.”
I was truly ashamed that I could not grasp the importance of his pub talk. It evidently meant more than a thousand erudite books on philosophy.
I said a hearty night night to him and to his vision of that friend Dell he’d lost somewhere in a past that may not hopefully have yet begun. I helped him to the pub exit, where the autumn night was lighting up with stellar crusades. He sighed and I watched him strut home through the oncoming shadows. “Goodnight, Dell,” I whispered.
If the truth were known, I’d probably just met a beautiful ghost that was haunting its former body.
He was watching her. She was to be his own personal girl companion, the one he had adopted from the whole human race as a fitting tribute to the work he had been undertaking for at least five eternities and which was now fast approaching its conclusion...
The sea was moving in the way her mother used to cast the silk table cloth into the warm mountain breezes, to be laid out for Sunday picnics.
One moment - sitting at the hemmed edge of the cloth, with a crystal glass of wine raised to her lips, with the shattered eye of the sun shining through it and revealing foreign bodies amid the sparkles; the next moment - far far away from those matriarchal mountains where the crustless sandwiches were eaten as soon as snatched from the creaking homely hamper ... to the sea that, even now, encroaches close to the girl’s sand-curling toes and is upon the brink of creating a new memory more fixed in time than those distant, indefinable picnics which, for all she knows, never happened, may never happen.
Her breasts are nude. The brushfire of hair below her flat belly is dashed with salt-white as the surf cascades nearer. It is peculiar that she should recall those childhood excursions to the mountain with her mother for, although every detail of the picnic is still coming back to her like paintings in a gallery, her mother she cannot picture at all.
The girl’s alone on the beach, but she would not worry if other tourists wandered onto the shingle to thwack a ball from tide’s edge to sea wall. It’s quite common to sunbathe bare these days, so she’d probably not get even a sidewise glance.
She feels as if she’s being watched anyway.
A black spider crawls like a phantom birth from the midst of her brushfire hair, as big as the palm of her hand, and waddles towards the sea. It must be blind for it does not flee the rattling pebbles of the strengthening tide.
Much to her surprise, several more spiders emerge and scuttle like crabs in all directions except back to her, until the whole beach is covered with their swarthiness. Even back in those picnic days, she recalled the irritating insects that often infiltrated the food, the ant-hill on which they had inadvertently pitched the tablecloth, the smoky clouds of hover-flies, the dead beetle floating inside the screwtop...
But today is something different...
When Reincarnations come to an end, all manner of peculiarities break out before the final death of one who has lived before through a thousand thousand deaths at least. Even the Reincarnators themselves reach their last eternity from time to time; the one of whom we speak celebrated his last throes by scattering all the black playing-cards in a tantrum across the gambling-table; he picked out one card from the table, to tempt fate, and found it to be the Queen of Spiders.
But was this the mother or the daughter? He knew the answer even before he posed the question. Through some unaccountable miscalculation of temper or tactic, he had indeed condemned himself to spending the real eternity of his retirement with the mother not the daughter, the mother whose only pleasure in her many lives had been to drop creepy-crawlies into the food she prepared and into other nice things...
The sea had covered the beach and all that was upon it, except the girl. She has returned to her hotel, feeling that a great weight had been lifted from her, as if she’d escaped a death worse than fate.
Those dreams without a dreamer were surely tangible at last, stories that I could actually remember or retell. Yet the roar of intoxicants pounding the pub door gave me final pause for thought, as I discovered that my efforts had been nought but wishful thinking - an array of dead-end nightmares: a dip-in duck-out of an odyssey. Moreover, there was no evidence I had narrated tales to myself, least of all to anyone else. After all, a bacteria’s ghost upon a suppurating dollop of residual scrag in an otherwise empty microwave had no mind, no thoughts, not even wishful ones, let alone a mouth with which to speak them.
The snug-room was empty, bar the accoutrements of booze and a grub-oven carelessly gaping in the spooky renewal of silence. Nevertheless, the real pub door would itselfopen wide shortly - and with the fire in the grate cheerily relit, the drunk man would again toast his makeshift fists, knowing I loved him for being me.
(published Alternaties 1994)
BLOODFEST
The wheels jam. The car seems to possess a volition of its own or, rather, lacks any volition at all. No amount of throttle, pumping the clutch, squeezing-unsqueezing the foot-brake, tussling with the hand-lever, twirling the steering-wheel and, finally, thumping her head gently on the windscreen can budge the damn machine. She curses the traffic lights which halted her in the first place: the red-eyed God of the stop civilisation. You see, she's quite maddened with rage, and will blame anything. Even the now blameless past.
Mari had been only a little girl. The war was in the process of being historically positioned for its allocated length of time - sufficient to take it from the day it started to the day it ended. It gave her blitzkrieg instead of nightmares: skyfuls of flak piss-sparking like God's migraine.
She had not been evacuated from the city, because nobody important enough was aware of her existence. There existed a small coterie of other similarly placed children who squatted in the corner of the otherwise empty schoolyard, exchanging shrapnel as their predecessors used to exchange marbles or prize conkers.
Mari's parents chose to ignore her. She slept in the backdorm and was not even invited into the Andersen shelter when the bombers droned in upon her ear-drums. She crept further down under the duckdown, trying to blot out the insidious rumble of dark shapes which she imagined to be in the even darker sky.
Somewhere inside her, Mari remained confident that there would be no direct hit upon the house, but a doubt niggled; hence the fear, hence the encroaching terror. Even when prototypes of unmanned doodlebugs abruptly regained the volition to cut their engines at the point when they potentially sounded at their loudest, the splintering explosion always finished up streets away toward the Cathedral area of the city.
One of the other kids who lurked by day in the school playground was a strange whimsical boy called Morry. He possessed an over-grown ear on one side of his face. Mari could not usually bear to look at him, as he rotor-bladed cigarette cards into the street from between the spear-like railings. One ear was quite normal, whilst the other sported a lobe like a pink duffle-coat hood. The latter ear's curlicue innards seemed biologically untenable and extraneous holes formed in the fleshy labyrinth at every opportunity of rupture. Mari imagined, when Morry became older and consigned to the trenches of another war, he'd be able to stub out his cigarette ends in that ear-lobe ... only to scoop them out later and make them into the longest joint in the world, to outlast the sleepless night - with only its red glistening tip comforting the other restlessly fearful souls who would bivouac close by.
As the regressive cycles of war turned into huge wastelands of spent history, Mari and Morry were eventually the only two left unevacuated in the playground. And so, eventually, Mari began to acknowledge Morry, although his strange ear still bothered her with its bizarre ugliness. But, as the summer became endless, they took to staying in the playground come the night and cuddling up to each other while the sky lit up with one false dawn after another ... and they pored over the depictions of car-makes upon the sweet-cigarette cards.
During the sporadic attacks, Morry heard the rumblings of the bombers louder and deeper than Mari did, since one of his ears was, after all, tantamount to a radar dish.
One night, before the summer finally ended, the blitz was brighter than normal, often illuminating the barely discernible dome of the Cathedral, and lasting well past daybreak. Such prolonging brought about the first air-raid to take place in the cold light of the sun. So, the two children could now see the dark shapes for what they really were: angels in splints, one of which looked heavy with child, soaring against the sun as if trying to obtain retribution, as any night creature would.
Soon enough, the angel’s belly yawned...
The woman driver slowly realises that the car's growing smaller. Otherwise, she is enlarging, which does not seem at all likely. She feels each hand with the other and the bone shapes are just as she recalls them. But can bones grow?
A child suddenly skips in front of the car, because, after all, the traffic lights are intended to cater for the need of pedestrians. Having been a child herself, she retains very little sympathy for this particular breed of humanity. On top of that, the child makes a face at her as it reaches the opposite pavement. And this face is not its own face.
"How many Far Things in an Ancient Penny?"
Mr Urgle-Wett stood by his high desk, confronting the upturned school dinners that passed themselves off as kids' faces. One face in particular did Mr Urgle-Wett loathe: a little urchin by the name of Morry who was often seen painstakingly picking his way through veritable townships of bogies not only up his nostrils but within that huge deformed ear with which the side of his face was endowed.
"Morry! Do you know the answer? It's only yesterday we went through the constituents of an Ancient Penny."
Morry's face was glazed. He'd obviously misheard the question. But, being a bit of a trier on the quiet, he gave his considered answer in slow methodical syllables:-
"The skware on the high pot tea news..."
"The question was, if you'd but wash out your ears..."
Mr Urgle-Wett could not finish his stern repetition of the question, for the fire alarm clattered to attention.
"Fire Drill!" he shouted, as the kids banged their desk-lids in unison with the spluttering bell.
"Not a drill, Sir."
A kid, even uglier than Morry, in sandy-coloured shorts, who always sat alone by the far window, pointed to smoke billowing from the nearby needlework classroom.
"Girls first!" was the first thing Mr Urgle-Wett could think of saying in the surprising circumstances of it not being a drill. One of the girls he'd always liked was, apparently, filling her fountain pen with ink from the wooden well built into the desk.
"No time for that, Mari."
He took her up in his arms as he passed and toted her towards the door, the boy pupils in his wake. The other girls were collecting their duffle-coats from the pegs by the nature study cupboard, chatting inanely, as was their wont, about next to nothing.
As he forced his way into the corridor, Mari's body thrust forward like a shield, a neat crocodile of paired kids hand in hand from another classroom was already passing through in apple pie order, being led by Miss Fitzsimmons. The fumes were quickly becoming a bit of a choker, so the crocodile's calmness should have been a sight for most sore eyes. Years of discipline had certainly left their marks.
However, Mr Urgle-Wett decided that the time had come to forget everything he'd taught, and he forced his way through the side of the crocodile. He cared little for the tiny feet he trampled with his hobnails. As widespread panic began to set in, resulting from his own actions, he withdrew the long willowy cane from down his trouser leg and began to flail it randomly ... having now dropped Mari somewhere behind him amid the increasing mayhem.
"Mr Urgle-Wett!"
A voice boomed from the other end of the corridor. It was the headmistress in full academic regalia, much like the giant black vulture-bat of the flat-headed variety seen gliding among the hills around the town in search of necking couples who were desperately trying to create relationships to restock the school with pupils but, inadvertently, presenting easy meat for her probing beak...
Mr Urgle-Wett halted in his tracks. Years of being cowed by the headmistress had so inculcated this snap reaction, even the raging inferno could not thwart his almost hypnotised return to the awesome discipline of the staff room.
He was evidently in for six of the very best.
Within sight of an ambling Morry, who had a smirk across his snotty chops, the headmistress' spanking wallops landed on Mr Urgle-Wett's already deeply wealed rump.
He tried to think of other things, Far Things, very Far Things, as the crackling came nearer all the time with the pretty pretty voice of flame. Meanwhile, Mari was in the playground, weeping to herself.
The light has been green for so long it readily resumes its red state, via the amber mode. The car growls. The woman driver turns off at the ignition, in the hope that restarting would cure the gremlins. But the engine still turns over, with an even gruffer undertone. She switches on the radio in order to outblast it, but she can only find cheap chat on some phone-in, where the participants whisper together, in view of the nature of the subject-matter. She opens the car door, but cannot unclunk the safety-belt. She manages to run the toes of her shoe along the gutter, in some desperate attempt to join up with the earth in some life-giving short-cut circuit, whereby the car...
In any event, the godawful pedestrian child has returned.
"What you doing, Miss? The light's gone green ten times since you been here."
The child she notices sports sandy-coloured shorts; and it indicates the line of traffic that has grown behind her. The other cars have been remarkably patient, in these days of road rage. She peers quizzically several times into her rearview mirror to discern the next in line - a face with large staring eyes and the closest possible resemblance to someone she knows without really knowing.
"I can't move the blighter - please fetch someone to help push."
"I'll push if you like," squeaks the child.
By this time, the car has taken to rehearsing tiny jolts backwards. Her neck is gradually suffering a pain that feels remarkably as if she has undergone whiplash injuries, from a sudden jolting motorway shunt. She can turn her head neither way - nor drag her leg back from its foot’s feeble clawing at the tarmac outside the car. By now, the child is heaving itself against the front of the car.
"No! The other way!"
"I'm not blinking well going to get all that muck in my face."
The driver has not been able to turn her head left or right, but she now finds she can pivot it upwards as if her neck is hinged. With her chin pointing towards the backseat (where, incidentally, she can now see she has a passenger with ugly-looking scars on the side of its face) she establishes the pedestrian child's meaning about muck. Indeed, black smoke belches into view at each articulated judder of the faltering engine. However, what shocks her more than anything is the evident absence of her original passenger - her own small daughter whom she was driving to school.
Several ingredients of humanity should now fit into the slowly evolving jigsaw of this particular experience. It all can be explained, everything, that is, except the driver's inability actually to solve the very puzzle which she knows is so very easily solvable.
"Hey, Miss, I'm getting filthy doing this malarkey."
She scowls at the child who is still trying to budge the vehicle from the front. The lights change to a combination of red, green and amber she has never seen before. And the onset of an incessant nagging hooter from behind sends her quite mad with irritation. She puts her hand down her own throat as far as it will go without it ceasing to be consistent as a hand - and begins to trawl around with webbed fingers. At last, she gets it started, having unapplied the liver-pads from the heart-stop and unclogged the lung filters for the red octanes to flow through some back-double arteries and rat-run intestines, pushing unwanted silt towards the anal exhaust - via the bilge sumps, the urgle-wetts and the oil-slicked ovaries. She unsteams her two-faced windscreen and sweeps off, through the bloodfest of the child, who has done so little to assist.
But, mid a mind's few and fewer far things, she hoped she had avoided the child. Cars' hearts, you see, were in the right place. Cars didn't really like leaving hedgehogs, let alone human beings, jammed to the tarmac, nor could they abide cruelty to squashed rabbits or, even, the spreading out of ears.
And as angel-winged history swooped off beyond the reach of all coned-off circuits, hard-shoulder diversions and electronic short-cuts, the world's endlessly static crocodile queue of cars did burst into ungodly red-eyed flame. Each with a stinging splinter of God’s next piss-sparking migraine.
Morry died as he heard, within his largest ear, Mari's barely discernible whispering from the girl's toilet across the other side of the playground - that she really loved him and would do so forever and ever. Then, there were left no kids at all to exchange shrapnel or flick sweet-cigarette cards. There was only a flap of smouldering ear-flesh spiked upon a railing. And other small joints of butchered meat scattered randomly between the white-painted netball lines of the playground. Luckily, Morry and Mari were always too young to realise that they'd probably never grow up to be grown-ups. And a future girl’s mother would never know she’d even gone missing under the onset of history except the act of trying to re-incarnate her from her innards did warrant she had been driven mad by instinctive knowledge of the loss. Once she had dreamed a forgotten dream, though, that a doctor had put an ear to her stomach and said it would be a boy.
(published ‘Implosion’ 1997)
ALTERNATE WORLDS
When Padgett Weggs looked at himself in the mirror, he discovered that he was not the person he thought he was. Another currently in the Mess came running over, on hearing him scream out.
"What be the trouble, Padgett Weggs? It sounds as if the Devil Himself has taken berth in thy very soul!" said Poke, his voice staying calm but betraying a hint of concern for his lifelong companion.
Whilst Padgett Weggs was a surly character, with worry-lines fanning in every direction across his "chamberpot" of a face, Poke was more typical of the Brothership, his lips being turned gleefully up at the corners, in contrast to the droopfish versions swimming across Padgett's face. Padgett's eyes, too, were sunken pits, whilst Poke's were usually receptive to the busybodying reflections of the sparkling stars aloft.
"I'm sick with worry that Clovis is leading the Brothership towards the whirring Fans of Hell," muttered Padgett Weggs.
"Come, come," said Poke, "this is no time for wavering - we've a Trial and a Quest to keep in motion."
"I know, I know, but I'm riven with self-doubt."
Padgett Weggs continued to stare into the mirror, wondering which was the image and which the image-maker. He could hear the cranking and churning of the pump outside the Brothership's Mess, no doubt being tended by Clovis. Soon Poke who had left the Mess would be with him, ensuring that the mighty pump retained sufficient lubrications in its moving parts. Clovis was a dear man, the only one who actually dressed as the rules of the ancient Brothership dictated, in full armoured leggings and coat of arms; he'd be preening himself, stroking his cockade as if it were the vibrant issue of his thews.
For years now, roughly twice in each of them, Clovis has shufflefooted his battered shooting-brake of a van into town - and he has always been struck by the large house silhouetted on the high hill. He could have sworn that the hill seemed higher with each visit, whilst the house itself remained in the same stage of distant dereliction.
The town was one not normally passed through. A traveller could only visit on one road and then leave by the same road. Yet Clovis was not entirely certain whether that had always been the case since his memory often played him tricks. He was half-convinced, moreover, that the place might have at one time been positioned near a short-cut to London. The town's buildings were rendered in chequerboards, often with the doorways partially set below the raised street level, the pavements being back-alleys in their own right. The town's name, Rosehearty, felt at odds with its nature.
Clovis had business in Rosehearty.
The populace was unusual in its proclivity towards such confectionery as boiled sweets, fudge and chews - and, indeed, towards saucy seaside bric-à-brac. Despite Rosehearty's proximity to an uncluttered coast, there never were any tourists to speak of.
Clovis was a free-lance confectionery salesman and purveyor of novelty knick-knacks and specialist prophylactics, bringing choice brands of sweets to Rosehearty, touring the corner shops (more such shops than corners, in fact) and re-stocking the neatly arrayed jars with jaw-breakers galore. He was particularly intrigued by the type of shopkeeper to be found there. Some wore smudged overalls as if grown on them like loose second skins. Others were round-faced individuals who had plenty of confectionary jokes to share ("Have you heard the one about the woman who couldn't resist bulls-eyes?" "No, but I bet she was a bit of a cow." Boom boom). Also there were narrow elbowy fellows who weighed out a quarter of lemon sherbets and then told the customer of the story of how these sweets lost their innards in the last dandruff shortage. Inscrutable chumps in red-stained aprons did a roaring specialist trade in beetroot-flavoured gobblers. One particularly nondescript man by the name of Poke sold throat sweets - which, indeed, looked like tiny throats torn from slightly less tiny living creatures. Clovis wondered who supplied Poke with such dubious delicacies because it certainly wasn't Clovis and, in any event, such 'sweets' should have been sold in a butchers shop - or so Clovis believed. And, finally, there was Clovis's least favourite sort of shopkeeper: the squat gleamy-eyed variety who did their business by slowly dropping the sweets (plop plop) into the home-made triangular paper bags, rather than in scoopfuls.
Clovis mopped his brow, but he couldn't be blamed for thinking the worst. The pump was spluttering in a mad tiswas and throwing up bits of brown sludge like fartfire into the dawn sky; the pistons were going twenty-four to the dozen, their sumpsucks soaking up the attenuating layers of nightsoil that Clovis thought the Earth incubated as a matter of nature.
This was his lock, stock and muck barrel; his whole lifeforce depended on the mining of Earth-closets pocketed like wind bubbles throughout the underfeet lands; he intended to live off selling the opulent effluent that the pump had been designed to syphon. The others of the Brothership, such as Padgett Weggs and Poke, were simply pawns in a game controlled by a Dung-master, all seeds in Clovis' search for the one cache of gruel, the rarest spadeoak of stiffened slurry, the sole grail of bowel-fodder, which he could make into hardened pellets of sweet loot to last through the tail-end times. But, give Clovis his due, after his own needs were satisfied, then the others would be allowed to fight over the rest.
Most of all, it was the house on the hill that stirred the hackles of Clovis' fancy. So much so, on his last visit to Rosehearty, just before his planned retirement from the trade, he determined to climb up to it, in the hope of selling off his closing-down residues, gone-past best-bys, long-term returns and remaindered runs.
The path was long and nettly, the underfoot being particularly treacherous. But, by the late afternoon, he had made sufficient progress to spur him to the summit. Eventually, the house, itself in the typical local chequerwork, reared above the ragged edge of trees, a lugubrious sight indeed. The window shutters hung by the skin of their hinges. The roof appeared to sag around the protruding tent-pole of the central chimneystack.
He rapped, the slightly sticky front door feeling like hardened black treacle to his knuckles. He raised his eye-line to the top attic windows, suspecting that any inhabitants (if they could breathe at all this far up into the sky) were peering down to see who was unseasonably visiting their lair. But nobody could be seen, except the frayed frills of weather-worn curtains, flapping in spite of the stillness of the ensuing dusk.
For the first time ever in the vicinity of Rosehearty, Clovis sensed the heady tang of the sea upon the roof of his mouth. He had never seen the sea when visiting the place nor, indeed, questioned its whereabouts. The inhabitants were not obvious sea people, merely close to the coast by accident rather than design. And, notwithstanding their loose tongues on other topics, they could never be drawn by outsiders to talk about the sea nor, for that matter, the house on the hill. Not that Clovis was especially interested in the sea, even when he had been reminded of it by the rare screech of gull or the relentless undergrunting of rather inefficient fog-horns (which could do, no doubt, with a suck of Poke's throat sweets).
The house had no front door, but merely tangible darkness. Clovis walked through, realising that his own body was past the sell-by date and anything could happen. He had seen that the house was stacked over with all manner of chimneys, roosting like a battered hat upon the hill's hump. Brooding above Rosehearty, it caused the inhabitants to feel more than just a little persecuted. Apparently, Shamble Hall, as the house had always been known, was an architectural shipwreck, but nobody could be certain about its condition since the path which ancient maps once showed starting at the end of the High Street was nettled over.
"Perhaps the proper path is on the other side of the hill," was one suggestion on a day when nobody had anything better to do than chitter-chatter. The speaker resembled Poke himself.
"Don't be silly, the sea is on the other side," countered Padgett Weggs, the town clown. And Padgett Weggs removed a gobstopper, to allow freer speech, breathed deep, crystallising the salt in the air (upon his outlandishly long nostril-hairs) ready for use as seasoning upon his Mum's stew come supper-time - and then he spoke of amazing matters. He pointed with his pipe. "Last night, when I was the only one up, the moon was wide open, rising like a brown balloon above Shamble there."
Most of his audience did not conceal their loud jeers, because all knew that the geography of the known universe made it nigh impossible for any moon (let alone a full one) to appear in that quarter of the night sky. But Padgett Weggs did not pull his punch-lines. "I also saw a chimney smoke..." He blew a bubble of sooty mucus (more yellow than black) from the end of his pipe, as if in demonstration. "I saw it come out against the moon..."
"It must have been a ghost, Padgett Weggs." The others guffawed, as Poke tried to humour him. Then just as they split up amid the mumblings of dusk, lips still fresh from Weggs-baiting, they all saw a large blotched yellowy bubble slowly expand from Shamble Hall's tallest smokestack. In utter disbelief, they shuttered their red-rimmed eyes with their lick-fingers, as they ducked under the chequered lintels for their lardy bread and acid drops. Padgett Weggs screeched like a demented gannet. His words were garbled but they possessed the same rhythm as "There she blows!"
That night, whilst the townsfolk of Rosehearty moithered in their truckles, all they could hear was the distant swell of the sea. Padgett Weggs was out scouting for signs of life on the moon, which his mother had once told him was a blunt pineapple chunk. Poke was spitting things out into his chamberpot.
Padgett Weggs was left alone in the Mess. He was Knight pure and true. He looked again into the mirror and the one in the mirror looked back, and both were surprised to see the tears in the other's eyes. His illusions were about to be shattered by an encroaching epiphany.
The whole Brothership, he included, had passed the Test of Wisdom, the Trial of Initiation, crawled on hands and knees through dark dripping shambles and emerged finally from a cave where an incontinent dragon had been said to leave its defecations as well as remnants of its brimstone stools ... and, on emerging, the drops of stenchfruit and fluid faeces would fall from their flesh, leaving them as clean as a virgin's breast.
Once marked with the Cruciform of Brothership, they were not allowed to produce a single turd from between their own nether cheeks. So with such inverted fasting and living just for this ever-onward Trial and Quest of Existence without throughput - the members of the Brothership simply drifted with the endless empathies that Big Pump supplied, and taught themselves to be merely content with such surrogates of excrement which spilled from Earth's innards. The ultimate bodily penance of eternal non-evacuation.
Padgett's tears were shed on behalf of the Brothership. Clovis had evidently let them all down - or so the mirror said. All had been falsely inculcated with a Godgiven task, whilst they were here on Earth, to fight on Spirit's behalf against Spirit's inevitable fleshy stirrings. Clovis had gained a mockery of sainthood from staunching man's natural spurtings whilst scrying instead Earth's hot brown springs, glorying in gory geysers, almost for their very own sake; relishing all the riches he fancied he could obtain from marketing sweet pellets from nursery volcanoes of shit...
But now, his mind overloaded with words, Padgett Weggs decided to take things into his own hands. He unoathed his oaths of metabolic celibacy, unvowed his vows of alimentary abstinence; he unlaced his trews, squinted at the reflection of his hairy hindparts in the repositioned mirror and painstakingly squeezed his very own tiny turd confection upon the shiny, disgusted surface. It crawled upon the glass like a slug, smearing and slurring the perfect pitch of reality that the mirror had previously contained. He then knew full well that he had altered forever the cycles of supply and demand upon which Clovis had so depended. And as only good could come of it, he was happy, perhaps for the first and only time...
Within Shamble Hall, the ladies, flounced up in great variations of ball-gown, sported ruffs and frills. Their ribbed showy corsets led tucks and pleats towards the most accentuating bodices. The nodding bustles and multi-layered under-skirts rainbowed the polished woods of the dancing-floor. They also wielded gossamer wings upon their backs, woven with slender bones. Furthermore, tantalising skeins stretched between each of these ladies like the finest confection of sugar-glass: beating like fans to cool their ardour whilst they waltzed from one set of leering beaux to another. The brilliant chanderlumes shone along the avenues of bobbing dancers as they took reflective rhythm from an ensemble of elbowing fiddles, sparkling silver flutes and trembling drum-skins. Candy-floss was being served at the bar where a contraption also extruded endless sticks of seaside rock. One silken-breeched footman crouched in the great fireplace, sending invitation messages tied to party balloons up the chimney.
Into the midst of such scintillations of sight, sound and sensuality, there tottered Clovis in yellow waterproofs, scratching his head and blinking his bleary eyes. He looked as if he had just disembarked from some godforsaken trawler in the Minches. "Lummee!" he expostulated. "I must be deader than a door-nail, but I didn't reckon on Heaven being like this. One moment a common commercial traveller and the next right up to my neck in this right old malarkey, this flipping Cinderella rag!"
Abruptly, Clovis' privities began to itch and, with the habit of years, he mauled at his flies to staunch the irritation. Then, the big stand-up clock struck its own version of midnight! His sea-proofs disappeared in a flash leaving him nuder than a fish - to reveal broken glass embedded in his groin, jagged shards of it splintering into the tenderest parts. A fine lady, still in her juiceable time of life, previously unnoticed by Clovis, skimmed off in a right old huff. True, the glass condom slipper he wore was far too small to fit ... but had, in turn, caused his privities to shrink amid erupting gorges of blood. It was probably irrelevant (but worth mentioning) that she didn’t spot the huge animal feast (which made its initial appearance as a big brown oxtail) emerging from Clovis’ backside.
The remains of the Brothership knelt around the dead pump, deep in unthinking prayer. Padgett Weggs’ forehead rested on the ground, as if the Earth and he were one, merely divided by the thinness of a skull. Poke, too, had just discovered that unthinking prayer was no better than death, his nostrils snot-ended, his hugely swollen eyeballs caked in yellow wax, his lips double-glued with a slick brown substance that had found the exit of least resistance.
Padgett Weggs, his legs held steady by the well-intentioned Poke, eventually delved into the shitpump's silent silo and expelled the sides of his own pink throat-gum like bubbles from his windpipe. Now kicking free, Weggs wagged his head back and forth like a spade; his quest being to chase a foxtail to its earth ... but Clovis and his brittle testicles had already fled to a corrupt roseheart at the centre of the Earth, like God to His shipwrecked Heaven.
Padgett Weggs frequently kept watch - from downworld - upon the darkened hulk of Shamble Hall. He ruminated on next to nothing, whilst gently chewing what could very well be the end of the line in yellow bubble-gum. And he blew a fragile shimmering globe of it, growing more brown than yellow. The shopkeepers of the seaport's chequerboarded streets (Poke included) dreamed of new dreams, of old jokes, of Hansels, of Gretels and, finally, of alternate metabolisms that were interwoven with the rest, amid the rather inefficient fog-horns of their snores.
(Published ‘The Dream Zone’ 1998)
MAPS OF MAPLAND
The teenage girl was a doodler.
Her parents used to frown as they scrutinized the results of her apparent scribbling. But to Lizbie, these were the multicoloured tangles of interlocking cat’s cradle games shared by two raving lunatics (both of whom lived inside her head) - multicoloured, because she continuously snapped-sprung the refills of different inks up and down within the fat barrel of the novelty pen.
Her parents put it all down to puberty.
Yet, as time passed, Lizbie found schoolwork slipping and sliding from her grasp. Her best friends had long abandoned her to the abstractions that almost blurred the actual face of their once cheery companion. For them, Lizbie was the past and boyfriends the only future.
Lizbie was unaware of boys. They did not exist. Even her parents backed off into the shadows of the stairwell, their complaints growing .......
She no longer considered her drawings to be doodles. As the monochrome biro which she now used instead of the multicoloured one left its convoluted trail on the paper, her brain followed it: a children’s maze game (does A B C D or E lead to the treasure trove?): or a single-minded Jackson Pollock mantra: and, finally, it evolved an almost recognizable shape, a monster with cross-hatched jowls and long disfigured nose (which, if she had known boys, she would have seen for what it was).
Each day, a different monster, a new gestalt. Her brows wrinkled (as her parents’ once did) but Lizbie’s mirrored the patterns on the page.
And each monster was a map.
Eventually, the two lunatics had a fight and killed each other. And as Lizbie grew older, she imagined unravelling the tangled skein of her brain and knitting it as it extruded from her ear ... which helped her endure the tidal re-enactments, by the two ghosts in her head, of their epochic victory over each other. Yet, the blood they had shed continued to drain through her body in fits and starts.
(published ‘Psychopoetica’ 1989)
nemonymous two
2005/6 REVIEWS OF THIS 2002 ANTHOLOGY WIILL SOON APPEAR HERE.
Followed by some links to its previous reviews.
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INFINITY PLUS REVIEW
DOWSE REVIEW
SF SITE REVIEW
E-NIGMA
The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada
NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL
QUICKSILVER EQUATIONS
And many other web reviews of Nemonymous Two since vanished.
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